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Mike Argento: Getting exercised over the shutdown

Updated:
10/10/2013 11:29:09 AM EDT

We all owe our esteemed congresscritters for providing a vital educational service. Thanks to them, we all now know exactly what the term “non-essential” means.

Cancer treatments for kids? Nonessential. Head Start early education? Nonessential. Nutrition programs for women, infants and children? Nonessential. Death benefits for families of soldiers who make the supreme sacrifice in defense of our nation? Nonessential.

A luxurious gym for members of Congress? Non-...

Wait a minute.

That's essential, apparently. It has been deemed essential that members of our legislative class have a place to play basketball and swim and lift weights and run on treadmills while they take a break from conducting the important business of democracy (at which they are failing miserably).

ABC News and the website Think Progress reported that the House and Senate gyms have remained open while many other government agencies have been shuttered. Anybody surprised by this? Thought not.

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It's reminiscent of the old days when that Nero guy ruled the empire, but instead of playing the fiddle while Rome burned, he jogged on a treadmill. Jogging on a treadmill, if you think about it, is an apt act for House Republicans who have been trying, fruitlessly, to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They keep running, but they never get anywhere.

Nero could be a role model for House Republicans. A lot of Romans believed that he set the fire himself — a fire that burned for five days and destroyed much of Rome — to clear the land so he could build a palatial complex, much like House Republicans burning down the government to make some kind of nihilistic point about something and then threatening to allow the United States to default on its debt just to see what happens.

(One possibility: The collapse of the world economy and western civilization. Sounds like fun!)

(Fun fact: Nero did not play the fiddle while Rome burned. The fiddle didn't exist then. He was probably playing a lyre, a stringed instrument that was always a big hit at dinner parties and orgies.)

Slate magazine ran a story in 2011 about the congressional gyms — the House and Senate have separate gyms because who would want to associate with “those” people — and reported that they are like “any mid-level commercial joint.” The House gym has the usual gym-type stuff, machines and whatnot, and a swimming pool, basketball courts, racquetball courts, a sauna and a steam room. It also has three large-screen TVs. Slate reported the TVs are tuned to CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or ESPN, but I suspect that they mostly play re-runs of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on a continuous loop to reinforce the congressional mind-set that the people they are charged with representing are morons who will buy just about anything. Or maybe the Home Shopping Network.

Of course, I wouldn't want to give you the idea that members of Congress are living a life of luxury while the people who do the real work of the government are laid off.

That's not the case at all. Some of them have had to rely upon unpaid interns to provide the level of deference they have grown accustomed to and to fetch their latte in the morning.

For instance, Think Progress reported, “No towel service is available.”

Oh, the humanity.

Imagine the suffering, having to bring your own towel to the gym and then take it home and maybe have to put it somewhere where someone can wash it. Or worse, having to go home and wash it yourself, putting it in the machine and turning the dial and then, when it's done, having to put it in the dryer. It's surprising that your typical House Republican could do something that complex without burning down the house, or taking someone hostage to do it for them.

Actually, we should be thankful that our members of Congress have somewhere to burn off excess energy. Otherwise, they would spend all of their time coming up with idiotic analogies for the current mess they made.

Um, about that...

Let's see, according to USA Today, Rep. John Culberson, a Texas Republican, rallied his colleagues with the words attributed to the doomed heroes of Flight 93 — “Let's roll.” Dude, you were shutting down the government, not saving the lives of perhaps hundreds of people by sacrificing your own. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who has the distinction of being the biggest attention whore in a body full of attention whores so shameless they could embarrass Miley Cyrus, cited “Braveheart,” putting himself in the Mel Gibson role, as if anyone would really want that.

Others have compared the Republicans standing their ground to the combatants at the Alamo or the 300 Spartan warriors who fought to the last man at Thermopylae. Remember, those guys lost.

One unnamed Republican congressman told Talking Points Memo, “I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into the Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it.”

So that means the Republicans are the Confederates, traitors who went to war against their own country for the right to own people, and House speaker John Boehner is Robert E. Lee.

OK.

And in another war analogy, Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, was quoted in Slate as saying, in response to a man urging to support an end to this nonsense, “Look, we're not French. We don't surrender.”

The guy talking to Sessions said, “Surrender what? You created the fight!”

So, it wasn't a perfect analogy. Maybe if he has some time to think about it in the gym, Sessions could come up with a good one about the time the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at @FnMikeArgento.